Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1494936
MARCH 2023 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 37 Matties: How do your customers react to your pricing structures? Obviously, increases are resisted, but you have to do what's right; you can't exactly send a $20 bill with every board you ship. ough some customers gripe about rising prices, they know it needs to happen. For too long in this industry, there wasn't a lot of pres- sure to make price increases; manufacturers were able to remain fairly flat. We weren't get- ting many price increases from our suppliers, so everything just rolled through. But over the last two years, pricing on everything— labor, insurance, raw materials, transportation, equipment, everything—has risen rapidly. I believe manufacturers are being forced to raise prices out of good business sense. Johnson: Matt, does that change how you approach your business model? Does adding different capabilities and regaining margin create an opportunity to pivot? We are actively looking for higher technology work that will give us better dollars per panel— similar sales dollars utilizing fewer panels. With some of the bread-and-butter stuff we've done over the past 20 years, the volumes are erod- ing and the pricing hasn't been able to keep up with the expenses. We are actively looking to enhance our offerings while keeping our cus- tomers happy on the lower end of technology. Johnson: What do you want the product mix at Sunstone to look like a year from now? Ideally, we would be implementing our tech- nology roadmap and garnering a larger share of that higher complexity business. I would like to see a higher percentage of our revenue come from that type of work. It would be nice to keep the overall growth trajectory and the mix in our shop different from day to day. Matties: Matt, you had mentioned flex, addi- tive, and so on. Where would you rank those in terms of priorities? ose are not a priority in our shop today, but we don't have our head in the sand either. We are looking closer at additive technology as a complementary product within the scope of what we do well. Flex is another option we are exploring but it is different enough and would require a different level of attention and dedi- cation to do well with high quality and we have not yet prioritized it in favor of some of the other initiatives. However, with a solid part- nership on the flex side, we can service our customers' needs and continue utilizing Sun- stone for their circuit boards. Matties: Where is the R&D being driven from in circuit board manufacturing? Overall problems with staffing and labor short- ages in the U.S. are driving more automation and more additive processing where less labor will be needed. Classic circuit board manufac- turing is a wasteful process, in general. From an environmental standpoint, it's probably being driven toward additive; it seems more logical as we progress in technology overall. Similar types of additive technologies, like 3D print- ing, are constantly getting better, and driv- ing other technologies forward. As everything Matt Stevenson